


Between Dreams

by aban_asaara



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Mutual Pining, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2019-10-06 05:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17339504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: Hawke doesn’t die; Fenris is with her.





	Between Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> [Apocalisse](http://apocalisse.tumblr.com/) asked for “A kiss that shouldn’t have happened” and “A kiss because I have literally been watching you all night and I can’t take anymore” for Fenris and Amabel Hawke. :D Combined because the angst gods turned their mighty gaze upon me, and I must serve.

Hawke wakes in her room, suspended in those half-moments before dawn.

Her drapes are suffused with a pale glow that drains all colour from the room, smoothes out the already-dim edges of her awareness. It might as well be fog, dense as the air before a thunderstorm, a palpable thing that rests leaden on her, almost smothering. Everything is half-faded in it, like memories on the cusp of being forgotten, as she hovers on the threshold between the Fade and the physical.

The one thing that shines, the one bright thing, is the lyrium that catches what little light there is to weave it along Fenris’s skin, washed-out to slate gray in the not-quite-dawn.

It calls to her like a beacon, out of the mists swathing her consciousness.

He sits curled up on himself in the armchair next to her bed, an elbow propped up on the armrest, his temple resting on his fist. After years on the run, he can slip in and out of slumber as though it were water, but he makes for a pitiful sight all the same, and Hawke reaches out to rouse him, tell him to get himself to the guest room, at least.

Her hand is her own, she knows—she feels the raised threads of the birds stitched on the coverlet under the pads of her fingers—but as she tries to stretch it out to him, it might as well belong to someone else. Her body is boneless, soft as a cotton ragdoll; her mouth falls open but not a sound comes out. The song that should thrum inside her veins is but a breathless sigh now, and when she turns her sight inwards she finds only a dried-up well where her magic should be. “Fen,” she tries, but his name is stillborn on her lips.

He too is caught in some in-between space, both close and far away. The barest stretch of her arm and she could brush the lyrium swirling atop his foot, but her breaths are small, shallow things, and though she tries to will her chest open she can’t manage more than a rasp.

Something rips inside her, tearing the breath right out of her throat and the sight from her eyes, and as her vision blurs and bleeds, she catches the light of a firefly, gleaming golden-green like a sovereign dropped into the sun and—

“Hawke,” and warm hands cover her own, and through the blur of her tears she sees the greenest green she’s ever seen, fanned out like a star between soft silver, “easy,” and she tries to close her hand around his but her fingers only curl uselessly.

Fenris strokes her knuckles with his thumb. “You were wounded,” he says, brow pinched. “Do you remember?”

Her breaths trickle again through the wounded thing that writhes in her chest. She nods her head once, though her memories are as smoke, wafting through her grasp.

He watches her for the span of one hard-won, laboured breath. “Do you want me to get Anders?”

“Stay,” she mouths rather than says, shaking her head, “please?”

A thousand things sweep through his gaze, too swift to name, then he runs his fingers through her hair; they tremble against the soft spot of skin behind her ear before he darts his hand away as though he’d been burned. “You are to drink this,” he announces, stepping out of her sight to return with a glass vial as he uncorks it. He sits on his hip on the edge of the bed, slips an arm under the nape of her neck, and lifts her head off the pillow before tilting the vial to her lips. It reeks of elfroot and spindleweed, pungent and sharp under a mocking whiff of honey that reminds her of the powders and perfumes some of the Hightown nobles use to mask the smell of their sweat. She seals her mouth closed and buries her face in the crook of his arm.

“You are acting as a child,” Fenris sighs. “Drink, or I will rouse the mage.”

It’s as much of a threat as she’s ever heard him aim at her—and it works, Maker damn it, it _works_ because she doesn’t want Fenris to leave her bedchamber when she still keeps that night clutched to her heart, lest it fade like ink in the sun, like snow on the palm of her hand. And so she drinks, even as the first few sips sear their way down her parched throat like swallows of glasspaper. White spots dance before her eyes when she starts sputtering, flames flaring bright inside her with each cough. “Easy,” he whispers, as gentle as she’s ever heard him, and waits for her to nod her head before bringing the vial to her lips again. And sip by little sip, she drinks, suppressing gags as the potion rolls down her tongue, somehow both bitter and cloying, until the vial is empty.

Fenris twists himself to set it back on the bedside table without moving her, then settles next to her on the bed. He doesn’t hold her so much as he curls himself around her before wiping the potion that dribbled down her chin and the quiet tears that stream down her face with his sleeve. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I was impaled by the Arishok,” she manages, her voice a rattle in her throat.

He laughs, softly, his breath warm on the crown of her head. Then his lips brush her hair, and there is something feverish in the stutter of his breath, in the way his pulse thunders against her cheek as she lolls her head against his chest. “Anders did not know whether you—would make it through the night.”

Even smiling hurts. “It’s only fair I make it through _something_ , after—” she wheezes, and swallows back a cough before it ripples through her broken body, “after the Arishok’s sword made it through me.”

At first she thinks she’s made him laugh again, then his fingers twist around the sleeve of her night dress. “ _Hawke_ ,” he gasps into her hair, her name wrung-out and chafed raw, and then again, “Hawke,” whispered feather-soft this time, and again, “Hawke,” nearly lost amidst the kisses he brushes upon her hair, and the curve of her ear, and her eyelids and the bruises on her brow and the tears on her cheek.

It’s the spindleweed, she tells herself, that weighs her head down and makes her lips fall against his, the barest brush of warmth as his breath sweeps her mouth. It’s not quite a kiss, not really, rather the mere suggestion of it, but as morning rises onto her room and sleep claims her again, she clutches that wisp of warmth to her breast, that one tatter among the windblown shreds of her consciousness, and prays that it’s not lost to the Fade before she wakes.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
